I think if it was one affair, this would hold. It is allegedly 3 and counting, and includes a likely spy from a rival nation, and likely knowledge of selling to the rival nation despite the current laws.
You can think he is amazing at many parts of this job, but at this point it is less of a mistake, and more a pattern of behavior that he knew was hugely risky and decided to cover up.
This is a terrible time for Nvidia employees. But the solution is not to invite the cause of the terrible time back in.
As for the extramarital thing, it's a private matter between him and his wife. Unless someone alleges there was any sexual harassment involved, but I have seen no claim that it is the case so far.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/12/politics/alice-huang-us-intel...
This isn't to discount the issues with NVIDIA and whether they knowingly participated in circumventing chip bans. Or conflict of interest issues. But running a business that benefits China as a Chinese national and making some reports to the nation just doesn't seem like "spy" to me any more than being part of the British East India company made a Brit a spy.
https://knowledge.insead.edu/leadership-organisations/mark-h...
However, if Jensen Huang was made aware of the potential for espionage, then his position is far more precarious.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/09/the-race-is-on-to-sue-nvid...
"A third category, one that would change everything, would arise only if the board’s investigation finds Huang knew about the intelligence connection. That would be “a whole other ball game,” as Bartlett said."
I have signed on to the Rosen class action.
US IC knows he knew, but cannot disclose the means at trial, so they’re doing this to remove him from NVidia.
Just for context:
> In April 2023, Trump hired [Todd] Blanche to defend him for concealed hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels and he led Trump's defense in the 2024 criminal trial. Blanche later defended Trump in cases involving federal classified documents and election obstruction. In November 2024, following his victory in the 2024 presidential election, President-elect Donald Trump announced Blanche as his nominee for deputy attorney general. Blanche was confirmed by the Senate in March 2025.[1]
He defended Trump's White House media ban[2] and most recently threatened to prosecute Democrats planning oversight probes into the administration[3].
FBI Director Kash Patel, for anyone who doesn't already know, is a Trump loyalist who was a director of Trump Media & Technology Group and reportedly made over $500,000 from Trump's political campaign. It is literally insane that he is the director of anything in the government[4].
Bottom line: time will tell who Alice Huang really was, but given the reports that Trump was informed she might have been a spy a year ago and didn't act on it, you can't expect honesty from loyalists he put in law enforcement positions.
If there's any concern that his inaction was a mistake, you can expect all of the people he put in positions of power to do whatever it takes to defend him, and that includes fudge the truth about the intelligence they had on Alice Huang.
Sources:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Blanche
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/27/todd-blanche...
[3] https://www.ms.now/news/todd-blanche-threat-prosecution-demo...
[4] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/the-fbis-controversial-...
Trump followers are big on “Trump is good for stock market”. I think market already dipped when democrats won but now it is not a dip anymore, that’s quite a crash we have now.
Recall that, in exchange for the US lifting export restrictions, Trump negotiated an agreement with Nvidia to receive 25% of the revenue from certain chip sales[1].
Trump prioritizing money over national security is not at all surprising.
There was some speculation that Rubio was the one who leaked this, as he had prepared a memo about Alice Huang that was presented to the president in May.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/14/trump-nvidia-h200-china-ai-c...
And how many trillions of dollars of wealth has been "removed" by American companies outsourcing their production to China over the past several decades, transferring their IP to Chinese entities through forced joint-ventures, outright IP theft, etc.?
By some estimates, the outright IP theft alone has caused $15 trillion in cumulative losses. According to the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, whose figures are used by the FBI and the Office of the US Trade Representative, IP theft costs American businesses somewhere between $225 and $600 billion every year, and much of that theft is at the hands of China.
Companies like Facebook and Google aren't allowed in the Chinese market. Do you find that "anti-competitive"?
Nobody is playing fair here and the notion that we can all just trade with each other equanimously is naive. The world isn't that kind and simple.
You don't know that at all. It's not standard procedure to immediately publicly out possible spies. Lots of reasons why not to do that including not wanting to let adversaries know you know who their spies are or to use them to feed bad intel or for watching what the spy does.
As for "standard procedure" and counter-intelligence, who knows? I'm not a member of the intelligence community. Are you?
The point of my comment is that, to many laypeople, Trump's inaction doesn't look good and that creates an optics issue for him. "Why would he let a Chinese spy who was potentially trying to use Huang to influence the president's US-China policy stay close to him?"
Given how the administration operates, you can expect Trump's lackeys to spin the truth (if not lie) to make his actions look more favorable to the public.
There's no evidence she influenced Jensen who influenced Trump who eased restrictions despite knowing she was a spy. Jensen has consistently been trying to relax restrictions for years, before they met, and others have made the same case Jensen has, that it's actually harmful to the US to restrict access and that a managed access strategy is better than a complete ban (and Trump said he would charge for it openly which I guess makes sense). She probably did what's called intelligence gathering. I personally don't have an opinion on the strategy.
Also, it's funny watching HN suddenly become hawkish on GPUs being shipped to China. Were you complaining about it back then or just now?
There actually is, for both: 1. the chip sales to the supplier employing Alice (how many chip sales were to other suppliers in China?), and 2. a $25,000,000 payment Jensen made to donald's ballroom slush fund, which he tried to keep secret.
There is also evidence that donald kept this quiet and then demanded obedience and obeisance: he admitted it in an interview recently.
As for what HN (an inanimate website on which thousands of different, diverse-minded people from around the world post) 'does', I guess sometimes it's funny, sure.
this is what the parent is saying is the problem. How is her not being spy change that?
And what's with all the people who think complex investigations get completed in days?
Almost certainly the same last name (黃/黄, huang2). It's also sometimes romanized as Wong (though some Wongs are 王, wang2).
Just found this on wiki -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng_(name) : "Ng (pronounced [ŋ̍]) is the simplified (tone-less) romanization of the Cantonese surnames 吳/吴 (Jyutping: Ng4, read in Mandarin as pinyin: Wú) and 伍 (Ng5, Mandarin Wǔ); and also of the Hokkien surnames 黃/黄 (Pe̍h-ōe-jī: N̂ɡ, Mandarin Huáng) and 阮 (Ńg, Mandarin Ruǎn).
The surname is often pronounced in English as /əŋ/ əng or /ɪŋ/ ing or /ɛŋ/ eng. It is sometimes romanized as Ang, Eng, Ing and Ong in the United States, and as Ung in Australia. In Cambodia, the corresponding surname is Oeng."
Clearly this list doesn't seem to indicate some of the names I listed, but I'm not sure if that's because it's an "example" list, or if some of the names are from different roots. Either way it was interesting to learn.
Note that that isn't to say "English is a simplistic language", though, it's just that Chinese has complexities in parts that don't necessary overlap with all sorts of intricacies of actual US English. Mastering both would be hard.
But at least it's not like Russian, which apparently uses more and rarer frequency bands - think DTMF, but more than dual and language specific, some overlapping some not. And English is likewise not the simplest kind of all in there as well, at all, to be extra clear.
As a russian I need some explanation here.
And human speeches come in harmonics, so I think we must be all using those like different combinations of DTMF tones. Human cochlea is also like a ladder ADC, so it shouldn't be so weird that we use combinations of "pressure points" to encode data rather than relying on a single central frequency.
I didn't mean to say that "them Russians talk multiple concurrent conversations at once by using different bands over there", no, just that different languages use different ranges and combinations of frequencies.
This frequency range and Russian advantage thing used to be widely used as somewhat hallucinatory explanation as to why people from certain country(a neighbor to Russia btw) are so atrocious at English in both input and output, that, allegedly, the ranges just don't overlap that we hear nothing from them and they hear nothing from us. That's why the Russian language came to my mind immediately here.
This theory is a bit inconsistent with reality, though, as our speeches are often considered high pitched than English while the theory argues that we're on the lower side.
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-jensen-huang-spy-claim-nvidia...
This is a beat sweetening story. You write up what your sources want you to write in exchange for them giving you juicier stuff later. It says almost nothing about the certainty within the intelligence agencies.
Usually a transition like this can be done well when a company has some mature product or service that prints money, like Apple or Microsoft or Google for example, and the company then needs a safe pair of hands to keep that machine running. It doesn’t seem like Nvidia is in exactly that kind of situation, it’s more like a red queen race that they’re the ones leading right now.
My understanding is, the thing that got him effectively fired, [0] is not the affairs themselves, it was not being candid with his board about the extent of the problem–he admitted to them the affair with Alice Huang, but didn't tell them about his other affairs (including at least one with a direct report) until after the board was made aware of them independently.
A board can put up with a CEO who cheats on his wife. It can't put up with a CEO who hides things from it.
[0] formally speaking he resigned, but it seems likely the board communicated to him "if you don't resign, we'll fire you"
If they work under you, yes? It's written into every business conduct policy I've ever seen?
It should be really obvious why entering into a sexual relationship with someone who reports to you without disclosing it to your manager is bad. The CEO reports to the board, so they disclose it to them.
As with security vetting interviews they don't necessarily care about the morality of the actions, just that they are wware and can prepare for the consequences.
There was a very simple choice the CEO could have made which would have avoided all this, anyway.
Also, we don't know exactly what Huang said to the board. Maybe, they didn't explicitly ask if there were any other affairs, and he didn't answer the question they didn't explicitly ask. Maybe, they did ask, and he lied and falsely said this was the only one.
In corporate America, that means he was fired. Nobody who "resigns" under such circumstances actually does so voluntarily.
Well, USA is selling Russia a lot of "dual-use components", including Texas Instruments chips found in drones and nobody makes a lot of fuss about that, even though, in theory, there are imposed sanctions on Russia because it started a war, keeps pushing hybrid war against USA NATO allies.
So, selling graphic cards does not sound like a big deal, especially given the fact that China, likewise Russia, North Korea or Iran can purchase anything through the fake companies place in Ireland, the Netherlands or any other tax paradise where nobody ask too many questions.
This is easy peasy now, in the globalized economy, more, it was always easy peasy, even during the middle of cold war and CoCom times, communistic countries could buy anything they wanted, e.g. communistic Poland had a net of companies in Brazil through which is smuggled whatever it wanted to purchase.
Some were allegedly with direct reports. One was allegeldy with an individual who posed a security risk. In each instance, there significant risk to the board, the company and shareholders.
He's obviously been very succesful in many elements of his role but this is very poor decision making. He could have just had affairs outside of work and been fine.
But I also think this perspective isn’t really the point. Regardless of the abusive nature, it’s still a tremendous conflict of interest for an affair of this nature to occur. The direct report would have a huge amount of leverage over Huang to keep the affair secret for one thing.
I don’t know the nature of these particular affairs, but regardless of who is or isn’t vulnerable, it’s still wildly inappropriate, and shouldn’t be tolerated
The only people who understand this kind of job and what it takes are people in the same sort of area. And you’re prolly only meeting them in your own workplace.
At least if you’re boning someone from work you don’t have to watch everything you say the same way.
I've seen people attracted to higher-ups ("coming on to them") in University and employment situations, and from outside looking in, the attraction could have been about the "power" the higher up was wielding (not necessarily using for bad; just the stature they had in the local society). TBH, people get attracted to people in power or with fame all the time (without actually knowing the person they are), so there is no reason it would be any different when there is a direct professional relationship.
Yes, this means it's tricky, and puts large demands on the "higher ups" — while they are similarly human with all their faults, it's still not necessarily the right thing to do — even, as a higher up, I'd struggle to differentiate if they are attracted to my "social standing" or to myself (if that can even be decoupled)?
But anything except a pre-existing relationship is fraught with peril: implied coercion and/or quid pro quos are just some of the problems that can exist. There are darn good reasons why that sort of thing is widely forbidden.
This should be obvious to everyone, but sometimes the obvious needs to be restated, apparently.
Favoritism certainly can happen in other situations, of course. Heck, "the GM's girlfriend" is a (negative) trope in tabletop RPG groups for a reason, or spouses favoring each other in competitive board games. And those are situations where (usually) no money is involved, and it's just for fun. Add money to the situation and it can be a dangerous mix. If someone really must end up being a supervisor over his own spouse plus other people, best to have someone neutral double-checking his decisions. It's easy to be blind to one's own conflicts of interest.
Surely there are cases around the world where an employee and his/her boss fell in love, married and that was the end of it.
Is it...? I feel like there's a lot more to unpack here. What if the thing a person fell in love with was that somebody just had more power (over them)?
I'd argue that people should fall in love on equal grounds, so the personality of a partner matters more than the perceived status of power.
There are wrong kinds of love that should either be discussed openly, or, if unsure, privately in therapy. Why not?
If there were anything inherently wrong with it, you would have to ban most family businesses. Just because some forms of something are undesirable, and a corporation out of laziness/practicalities enacts a general policy to ban all forms of it; that does not make the entire thing morally reprehensible automatically.
And it's wrong. At its worst it's rape-by-coercion, trying to hide behind a thin layer of plausible deniability. It's not a circular argument at all: the behavior is bad for objective reasons, and that's why it's forbidden. In more favorable cases (where there's no coercion involved) it's still trading something of monetary value for sexual favors, which makes it a form of "prostitution lite". Again, there are objective, non-circular reasons for it to be forbidden.
What you’re not seeing is that the infractions you describe are just drops in a bucket. This guy created billions of dollars and is responsible for the revolution in ML we see today. It is through his foresight that ML is even possible at the scale we see today. He changed the world. He is one of the core people sitting in the center of a global paradigm shift that will change our lives as we know it. You thought this ai stuff was just chat bots? Now it’s writing our software and dismantling academia piece by piece. It’s obvious what’s coming next.
What should be ALSO fucking obvious is that kind of change makes fucking a couple employees and some random honey pot from China basically NOTHING in comparison. It doesn’t fucking matter if there’s some unfairness or some kind of bullshit conflict of interest or favoritism in the company because that shit is MINOR.
You said sometimes obvious things need to be restated implying that it needs to be restated for me specifically. Let me fucking straight with you. YOU are the one fucking blind to the obvious. Wake up.
I guarantee you the board doesn’t give a fuck about any of this shit. They were just waiting for an opportune time to oust him. It was the same for bill clinton. God ousting him for favoritism when favoritism basically exists for almost every company out there? Seriously?
If you’re a board member and you’re making billions because of Jensens decisions as a ceo, are you gonna give two shits about favoritism or Jensen fucking some employees? Fuck no you wouldn’t.
Or perhaps I'm misreading you. You did, after all, open with saying that you agree with my comment that you're replying to. So if your only point is "the board didn't care, that was an excuse to get rid of him" and you're not excusing his behavior, then sure, I agree with that statement. His behavior was an open secret among the company, after all; they had to have known, but were willing to ignore it when it was convenient to them. Which is immoral of them, let me add. I agree with you that that's what they did. I do NOT agree (and I hope you're not saying) that it was ethical or moral of them to ignore it until it became publicly known.
However, if he is fired, that is more a punishment for the company than for him, because he is extremely rich and at the age of retirement, so he does not work because he needs to, but just because he enjoys it.
A real punishment for him would be to lose without compensation a part of his NVIDIA shares.
If it is ever proven that he broke any export control law, then a punishment for that is a decision for the judicial system.
No, the engineers he employed did. They will continue to do so after his departure.
There are too many bad CEOs, so the CEOs who are not bad, like the CEOs of NVIDIA and AMD, must still be praised, and the success of their companies was conditioned by them not being bad CEOs.
There are a lot of examples when a bad CEO, coming after a not bad CEO, has destroyed a very successful company in a few years.
There are only two options, either A) to pretend that it doesn't happen, or B) to acknowledge that it does.
The idea that corporate policy could ever control what goes on people's bedrooms is of course absurd, that's just option A.
The board can’t trust Huang if he lies repeatedly and breaks company code of conduct.
A lot of it is just silently ignored if found out.
It is not remotely common, and is grounds for firing at every single job I've ever held.
You misspelled "penis".
> A manager fucking his direct report(s) is extremely common
Let's just legalize rape by "valuable" people, it's fiiiiine
Y'know, this is why people don't like techbros. It's shit like this.
EDIT: I hope the downvoters understand they are proving my point.
A manager having a relationship with a subordinate is unethical, but let's not call it outright rape, OK? There is a difference.
A manager fucking his subordinate is coercion at the very least due to the power imbalance.
This is not a consensual relationship for the same reason that sex with a "willing" person held at gunpoint isn't (even if there is no explicit verbal threat).
Whether it crosses a criminal threshold of sexual harassment or sexual assault , depends on the jurisdiction and circumstance.
In any case, it is not OK.
It is immaterial whether coercion of this sort is "not outright" rape.
Parent commenter's logic that justifies it because the CEO "has value" applies to "outright" rape as well.
If sexual harassment of a few employees is "pennies" compared to Jensen's value, so is "outright" rape.
This is what I have issue with.
You cannot just assert that a relationship is non-consensual without knowing anything about the relationship concerned.
One affair, shame on him. Three affairs, and wanting him to stay as CEO shame on them.
If the press knew about it, I'm sure Jensen did. More than enough reason to fire him.
What is the message sent if they don't fire him? It's ok to break company policy and sleep with your subordinates? It's ok to turn a blind eye to people breaking the law?
It more feels like someone wanted him gone. The second affair had to be leaked because after the first one it still appeared he still had a good chance of remaining CEO
It is pretty clear he lied to the board after the first news broke and that is why he was sacked.
One of these things is a mostly private matter between you and your spouse. One of them involves congressional hearings and may land you and your company in serious deep poop. And one of them is widely recognized as an abuse of power in the workplace.
this is not about the affairs or spy, this is about the future of Ai and who gets to decide what that looks like, Jensen is a casualty in other peoples games
there are reports the whitehouse is considering ousting Lutnick over this, sounds like we have a lot more to learn about
How can he not know he was sleeping with a customer and a direct report?
> he's just having an affair
Interesting use of the word "an" and "just."
> that the government knew about
Because of an investigation into illegal smuggling.
> and didn't tell him
Is that a judgement of whether he's a good steward of a multi-trillion dollar monopoly?
> because there's no evidence of anything untoward
Right, because the current administration only acts upon evidence and definitely not self-enrichment and cronyism.
Wow, how can every single word be such complete bs?
Because Jensen chose to mix personal and business. Even having an affair with VP of Nvidia itself. If he couldn't even keep a vow and promise to wife and keep his family out of it. Why would you trust any person like this. This is his own fault.
this is clearly not just an affair. Why are you reducing it to that despite that line in parent comment. you obviously read that.
I see this "just a innocent affair" on twitter. Whats going on. Who are these ppl.
The problem was that he was having affairs with employees who reported to him. That by itself is disqualifying, and then possibly he lied about the board to it?
Anyone who was passed up for promotion now has a credible lawsuit
Do the numbers. Let's say 5 people sue and are awarded 10 million each. Or even 50 million each.
- Avoid actual or potential conflicts between personal interests and their obligations to Nvidia.
- Remove themselves from decision-making when such conflicts arise.
- Contact Employment Legal when there is a perceived or actual conflict.
So this probably isn't about the affairs but a breach of trust with the board.
To speed run most of what's out there spend a few minutes trying to understand the issue [0]. You think MegaSpeed is on the up and up? Doubtful.
But sure, tell me again that everyone needs to have perfect control over all their most powerful urges to keep their jobs?
Guess you’re not fat, never fucked anyone you shouldn’t have, and definitely never drank more you should have at any point?
Given Jensen is one of the two founders that still has stock (the other being Chris Malachowsky) I suppose there could be some room for interpretation.
Yes. I don't want someone with that lack of moral character leading multi-trillion dollar companies. You can forgive Jensen, maybe even some of the people Jensen harmed will forgive Jensen, but I separate individuals forgiving the man from letting him remain the public face of Nvidia. I wouldn't want to work for him at this point.
> its likely quite a few CEOs are, only difference is you don't know about it
I hope more CEOs get caught so they can be held accountable, too.
If anything, it's the spy aspect that would qualify as gross negligence, but affairs themselves are his personal issues to sort out.
I don’t think an affair or ten matters in the US.
public figures get more public scrutiny
Why care at all about the private life of a CEO?
_From the board's point of view_ 1 affair is a moment of weakness. 3 affairs (after assuring the board there is no more bad news) is a pattern of untrustworthy dishonesty which infects every fiber of his being.
Nothing he said could ever be believed again.
Some people don't believe in exclusivity or monogamy, some people believe in a clear separation between love and sex, some marriages/partnership are over for years but partners have a tacit agreement to pretend for various reasons instead of divorcing, etc.
Are you privy of their life?
A one-night stand might qualify better as a "moment of weakness", but that’s not what we’re talking about.
The board backed him after the first affair was made public but shit canned him after the 2nd.
This indicates that 1 is okay but more than 1 is bad to answer the GPs question.
... than this still is stricly a private thing.
At least in many countries outside the US. There was this fun thing happening then Walmart tried to expand to Europe ... doing zero investigation about social norms before that. They tried to forbid their employees to have relationships. But the germans just said "To the heck, we don't let restrict our freedom by private entities". Over there there are thousands of marriages between e.g. a hospital Dr. med. and nurses. And all of them started as a relationship between a superior and one subordinate. From a german PoV this is entirely okay. What would not be okay is abusing the power of being a superior ... but that has to be backed with evidence first, otherwise it's just a sly accusation.
Don't people have personal freedom of expression in the US? Or can't they enforce their freedom against the powers of the employers or the lynch justice like moralizing of complete strangers?
Always puzzles me.
For the obvious reason that you spend many hours of your week in the workplace, it becomes the place where you meet the most people in your life and that includes friends but also your potential love or sexual partners. As simple as that.
If he was French, this would be an attaboy moment - without the spy allegations, he'd be cheered on. However... in such a puritanic country as US, I suspect it was the second disclosed affair that cost him his position.
After all, it changed the narrative from Huang being "someone who fell to nation-state honeytrapping" to a regular, equal-opportunity filanderer.
- there is no concrete evidence that Alice Huang was even a spy
- the whole thing was made up due to nothing but pure Sinophobia
This looks like some three letter agency dumping what they have on him, most likely as a punishment for not playing ball.
In these circumstances, I don't really feel like in addition to messing up his reputation and his famil(y/ies¹) and other punishments his going to have, there should be another punishment given to his company and employees.
Ofc, my knowledge of CEO level management or even advanced GPUs is limited and I welcome any critique to straighten up my limited views. Just wanted to point out hypocrisy and the tendency to throw out the baby with bathwater.
1: sorry for that joke to those whom it offends.
Jensen was dumb enough to have one with a Chinese spy, but that doesn't take away from the fact that he's one of the best CEOs of the modern era, and his work at Nvidia has been outstanding.
Even if, as others have suggested, the evidence against Alice Huang isn’t strong, there are still huge conflicts of interest and repeated lies in play. Let’s move on
I agree its morally wrong, but that's really a personal issue for the family, it's not a crime. Sleeping with some employees is barely a problem IMO. And worst of all, when I look at the amount of corruption and immorality amonst say Musk, Zuckerberg, the Trump White House going after Jensen is crazy. Jensen is the billionaire who's happy to pay all his taxes and not interfere with politics or elections.
And besides all that, it seems the Trump admin KNEW about Alice Huang and Jensen's relationship for a year, Lutnick also knew, the intelligence agencies knew. Why is Jensen the only one going down for this? He is getting crucified because he's less Machiavellian than all the rest.
Because this isn't a moral issue, its a dirty political fight to entrench power within OpenAI & Anthropic. Without the Chinese companies getting chips, we would not have Deepseek or Kimi or any frontier-level open weight models. And if these guys succeed, we will all be locked into corporate paid models that spy on you and censor you for a long time.
People need to look at the bigger picture, this is about killing open-weight models and that may be good for a few US cos but it is terrible for the world.
but everyone is outraged about some affairs - it’s a staged planned media operation. And most of the tech industry seems to tune out anything about politics because its “low brow” so they’re often clueless to the depths of depravity of this admin, but theyre jumping onboard the Jensen hate train.
Edit: HN is so much fun to have a conversation on these days. AI psychosis and clankers. o_O
But Jensen Huang has admitted to a longstanding affair with the CEO of a company that appears to exist only to evade ITAR restrictions. It's just impossible to believe that Jensen did not know what MegaSpeed was doing. While by all appearances he facilitated and benefited from it personally.
And one can also believe that ITAR restrictions on GPU sales are dumb, but evading them still counts as selling sensitive weapons to the enemy, both legally and politically.
Instead, Export Administration Regulations (EAR) applies to exports of technology (software and hardware). Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_Administration_Regulati...
About MegaSpeed: They were NVidia largest customer in Southeast Asia (which includes Singapore), buying about 140,000 GPUs in the last 2-3 years. Then, then built data centers in Southeast Asia and rented the GPUs to Mainland Chinese companies. To be clear: From 2023-2025 (their peak), this business model was not prohibited by United States GPU export controls. However, that will probably change soon.
Also, both the company she was "CEO" of and her path to that role are so shady that it's unbelievable that it even worked. Though it seems it did to a point.
Anyways, I think he knew; or at least suspected it and kept going.
they already know nvidia is circumventing ITAR and were fine about it for about a year. you are not seeing the real question, which is: why now? what changed?
It depends on him, i can see things breaking at NVDA enough to ask him to come back
Even employee action here is pretty powerful
If he wants to come back is a different thing, he can do anything he wants
He can start a competitor to NVDA and poach enough employees to build a product and is connected and rich enough to get manufacturing and supply chains going...
Or he might just want to enjoy his life
They've also taken a pretty big pay cut this week and potentially into the future.
Now I am waiting for Microsoft to enter the drama like they did with OpenAI
He didn’t do anything incredible.
3dfx, Matrox, S3, ATI, and Cirrus were also in the right place at the right time, but there's a reason we're here talking about Nvidia and not them. How much was Jensen vs things out of his control though, few people will ever know.
Unfortunately Jensen's 3.8% of $NVDA and/or golden handcuffs won't let him do this; but what I'd give to live in that universe.
https://polymarket.com/event/how-many-jensen-huang-affairs-w...
Is this sarcasm? I genuinely can't tell.
On the other hand the potential spy stuff and corruption is quite worrying.
The DOJ, The CIA and the FBI are all saying that these claims she was a spy are not convincing...
Its a very calculated political hitjob, when the spy allegations didn't hold up, and the megamond accusations were hearsay at best, all of a sudden they started dropoing new affairs. Its very scheduled/coordinated.
Also me saying this instantly gets downvoted. There's bots in this thread downvoting any mention of this.
The timing is curious; the admin knew for at least a year and managed to keep a lid on it, and then congress flipped, meaning the oversight and intelligence committees would be chaired by people with a (D) in their name
> Seems to me that Trump likes Jensen quite a bit
Marco Rubio probably doesn't; which would explain why it was leaked to the press and not via a formal DoJ or Commerce Department investigation. If Rubio has presidential ambitions, now is probably the best time for this to come out and not after the Democratic party gets subpoena power, and difficult questions about the administrations inaction to go with it.
with the whitehouse rumored to be considering ousting lutnick around this, the story is about something other than affairs (which are the cards you hold until you want to make big moves)
Trump and Xi meeting next week
He did get suspiciously political very quickly around that time. Im definately not convinced that this is a Red Vs Blue thing, I think there's plenty of people on Trumps team that are extreme China hawks.
Its hard to know for sure, but I dont think the lady was a spy. Atleast not until I see evidence.
We do this kind of mysoginist thing in the West when we see successful, well dressed Chinese women close to polticians, CEOs and label them spies, pawns of the CCP... Like Mitch McConnels wife gets this treatment frequently.
Even if she was funneling GPUs to China, which there's also no evidence for other than claims in the WSJ that lack any evidence. I dont think being a cunning business women makes someone a spy, nor does it make Jensen complicit.
Its as if we dont want to admit to ourselves that its possible for the Chinese to be successful, cunning and tactical like any other business person without it being a shadowy plot of the communsit party.
Its very weird, and it makes it super easy to manufacture consent around stories like this.
It's not even smuggling either; if the destination government is cool with your imported product, you declare your import like every other legal import. Using 3rd party countries to go around export restrictions is a very old entry in the sanctions-busting playbook; I'd bet every single sanctioned country in the history of sanctions has done this in some shape or form if there existed at least one third country that traded with both sanctioner and sanctionee.
There's also a lot of other evidence for smuggled GPUs
Someone is playing games here, it's just a question of who and what their ultimate goal is.
there are very differing opinions among the presidents cabinet, re: Ai, chips, open weights and certainly some real china hawks in the NatSec bureaus
So much for the bot downvoting theory
If people are downvoting you it's because you're spinning conspiracy theories around a topic that a lot of people have personal financial interests in.
The sort of quick rule I have for measuring credibility is "how much of a story is it when a reporter or outlet gets something meaningfully wrong?" For the NYT, it's a rather important story, like the Iraq WMDs you mentioned. Which, needless to say, was over 20 years ago.
We'll see what the truth ends up being with time.
¿Por qué no los dos? Access Journalism easily explains both. Journalists know where their bread is buttered - members of the "deep network of sources" may occasionally call in favors, or drop breadcrumbs leading journalists to a specific, preselected destinations.
A recent HN thread led me down the rabbit-hole that included an opionion of some (British) monarchy insider. They observed that the monarchy would sometimes leak a story to the press with specific framing, and then the article would include the usual "We have reached out to the royal family for comment" spiel, and yet the entire article is the comment by the royal family. On the other side of the Atlantic, it wasn't too long ago that JD Vance was outed as the unnamed source of a story that the Trump admin subsequently attempted to sue for on national security grounds.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/12/politics/alice-huang-us-intel...
Not really relevant,
But the NYT laundered crimes against humanity and covered up the death of 30k children over the last three years. They published dozens of provably fabricated stories to do so. Sorry they dont have weight to their journalism, they are completely beholden to whatever special interest that benefits them.
Ana Swanson, the NYT journalist who broke this scoop on Jensen frequently uses Jack Clark an Anthropic founder as a source in her AI scoops.
Dont call me a conspiracy theorist, its extremely insulting.
Stop letting people think for you. There's little chance you verified any of the reporting of the NYT. Wild, we literally live in 1984, peoole do not think for themselves...
You have the internet you can verify things that journalists say, you can fact check people. Try it!
You're using the "conspiratorial they" (as I like to call it), that "they" failed with the spy allegations so started releasing information about affairs.
And then, to top it off, you play victim and say there are bots scanning the comments and automatically downvoting you.
This also only touches on the potential spy aspect. The largest part of the story is Nvidia seemingly intentionally breaking US trade laws over something that a significant part of the AI industry believes should be treated as dangerous as nuclear weapons.
Conspiracy theories don't have to be wrong or crazy, but what evidence do you have to so confidently claim that yours is correct?
---
I've been following Nvidia for a long time. I've seen online discussions of the company become increasingly corrupted since 2020/2021. The only explanation that's held up for me is that money corrupts, and there are a lot of individual shareholders of Nvidia stock that feel a duty to try and protect their investment. I have no idea if that applies to you, but I'm saying it to give you an idea of the angle I'm reading these threads from. More recently, AI has provided new potential sources of corruption aside from investments. When I see you and the mass of other people in these threads that are presenting these ideas of a conspiracy to take down Jensen Huang for sinister reasons, well... my initial reaction is rather negative.
> This is not a conspiracy theory
> [proceeds to explain carefully organized plot between Anthropic, Rubio and Bessent]
————————
> This is not smuggling
> [proceeds to explain that if destination country is cool with imports then it’s ok to send goods via 3rd country]
————————
> She was not a spy
> [explains what she did and what spies do, same thing]
Forget the spy stuff. If your CEO is schtupping customers and employees, are you really going to trust him with running your company? If you, as a board member, don't draw the line at hiding the sausage in your customers and subordinates, where do you draw it? Drunken bar fights? Road rage incidents? Rape? Murder? All fine as long as it's his personal life? All fine if he's making the company money? I don't think that's how most BoDs for massive corporations operate.
- How certain are reports about spies in general? There has been reports lately, that I have seen, involving spies. For example the one in SF... - Would it be wise to think that there are powerful people that want him out of the company? Because the affair is one thing, but there is an accusation that should be investigated, right? - He has been too many years in the company... this is not the first personal issue we can judge him about. Why now?
Thanks!
Other than some possible treason with an adversarial country, yes pretty clean record.
If the investigation finds he didn't divulge secrets or participate in moving chips to China I'd like to see him brought back by popular demand of his team, and also investors.
Hopefully Nvidia will survive and thrive. After all Apple sort of survived the passing of Steve Jobs, ..after a while.
What if the affair was with the executive of a customer who is also responsible for redirecting assets to a hostile nation state? Would this CEO be vulnerable to blackmail? Are you sure this is the only vulnerability he has?
Is it possible the board is now privy to details and information these employees may not know? Fiduciary duty does have a meaning.
The real problem here is that he was knowingly selling GPUs to a woman who was then selling them to China. This is where he would not be fulfilling his fiduciary duty as now the company will be coming under fire for export violations.
What's the thesis? That their nepotism harms returns? Well clearly that is not true because now that it's not happening, the stock valuation is much lower.
It's only an ethics violation with a huge age and wealth difference.
He should have been more paranoid. That he wasn’t makes him unfit to be CEO of Nvidia.
who benefits from neutering nvidia like this?
as always in any organization there are absolute drones who have the everyday startegy of demonstration of loyalty, especially - like this case - when there is no reprecussion possible
I despise them
This is looking more like a NYT hit job. Drop unsubstantiated anonymous allegations after the election. The board hires a left wing firm to do 'investigations'. The plan here for the anti-AI left to take control of AI at the source - Nvidia. It's time to fight back.
Or is it a way to get clicks and subscriptions, or a way to burn someone for a nefarious purpose? I don't know the answer, but this is the level of "conspiracy" that is plausible in my opinion.
Take out Jensen, install someone with an alternative alignment, now the power balance has shifted. Jensen was an ally, the person he is replaced with, possibly not so much.
Jesus, everything is party politics in the US, ain’t it? Enough of your brain rot.
I don't just mean making money successful like polymarket etc. but he was the head of a company that created multiple huge technical achievements in past decades. He made huge bets on multiple things and the bets actually worked in the end.
And they will very likely replace him with a bunch of accountants. It is not hard to understand why someone would want to have him as a leader instead of an accountant.
Because no one else can fill the shoes. The best that the next CEO can do is either:
a) make improvements on what exists, and thus effectively stagnate in a moving hardware industry, or
b) cut staff (which Nvidia has only done twice in its history: 1996 (near-bankruptcy), and around 2008 (360 / 6.5%), right in the middle of ironing out the Tesla architecture).
The moment their CFO took over, they already announced layoffs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BayAreaTalk/comments/1xu5wzy/nvidia...
The CFO is almost never one that makes unique product decisions.
Alexander the Great was an extraordinary warlord and a mediocre king. He died unexpectedly, and his empire collapsed immediately.
Securing succession is a huge part of leadership in any organization that is supposed to outlast its leader. Because unexpected things can happen at any time, a leader must keep the organization in a shape, where a plausible successor can take over and continue leading it successfully. If no such successors exist, the leader has not done their job properly.
This presupposes that there are successors that can fill the roles. Even after curation, what's left will very rarely match what's required, doubly so with tech-centric companies. The CFO now in charge is the perfect example of this.
A regression to the mean more often than not happens as a result.
It’s easy to say you don’t have a price when no one is offering to buy you.
At the point you've accepted RSUs you're already working for the company. If you hate your employer enough to turn down a significant portion of your total comp package, you really need to question how you got in that position.
Like you aren't technically wrong but, idk, are you expecting anyone to agree?
The forces at work answer your question. Why would someone take RSUs from Nvidia? Obviously because that means they're getting hired at Nvidia which is one of the highest valued companies in the world, and the RSUs represent a lot of more money on top of your high salary and permanent resume clout.
In Taiwan, Nvidia and tsmc are the two highest salary payers in the country. It's frankly funny to think of a Taiwanese engineer hesitating at a Nvidia offer letter because of niche FOSS/right to repair/IP liberation ideological qualms when the alternative is sweatshopping it at some no name chip industry side company that pays 30k/year at the high end.
I really hope you take some time to reevaluate this extremely misogynist take.
You could have the exact same situation with a different company/CEO and the HN comments would be completely different
Notably real business acumen precludes lawbreaking, but until there is concrete evidence, I won't simply rely on the court of public opinion.
"We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators."
Assuming these remarks are representative of employee sentiment more broadly, if you’ve been running a company for decades and yet your employees don’t feel like your beneficent ethos is obviously reflected in every single other person in leadership, that suggests to me a completely different sort of managerial failure.
No one should be seen as fungible, and this is not to disparage the clear connections so many people feel with the guy. But if people feel like any group is being held together by a single strongman, that person has failed to do their job of actually infusing the essence of the culture into everyone around them. But I guess that’s what modern corporate leadership tends to looks like: a cult of one personality.
Yes because humans would go extinct if we had sex only once a year. Reproduction would become a rare occurrence beyond 15.
Cicero, Against Verres 2.5.4 (tr. Yonge, 1903), http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
(strawmanning a hypothetical defence of the person he was accusing)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Verres#Trial_and_exile
> [Verres and his defender Hortensius tried to delay the trial until a more sympathetic judge was available, but Cicero] opened his case with a short and blistering speech. He listed all of Verres crimes during his time as governor of Sicily and showed evidence that Verres had amassed 40 million sesterces in that time. The effect of the first brief speech was so overwhelming that on August 13 Hortensius abandoned the defence as hopeless, and recommended his client leave the country. The following day, Verres was found guilty and fined three million sesterces.
2. I don't think "plenty" means majority, especially when it comes to married people, sure plenty of single coworkers or whatever other relationship are having affairs more likely than the married ones, but yes, if married person has affair it's most likely to have it with coworker for obvious reasons (seems studies say roughly 1/3 of all affairs are with coworker)
What do I know, I’ve never done either? I would say that the pedophiles are a more serious power dynamic issue, but you are entitled to pick the other side of the issue, I guess.
Don't fuck subordinates. He did this in his company and a partner company. I'm sure we've all had the opportunity- just don't.
Confused on whether people are actually upset about both or even understand the issue, or are just upset about one thing while using the other as ammunition.
Its not the only way to support his ousting. But its one way.
He isn't being punished for "banging" anyone he's being punished because it hurts "US competitiveness" to send chips to China via the export smuggling operation that spy he was "banging" operates. It would not surprise anyone to found out he broke several federal laws. That's the point, no one actually cares about his sex life.
The guy was smuggling material deemed by US law to have export controls for national security reasons to the very country "US competitiveness" has been hyperventilating about for over a decade now. Resigning is the least of his concerns he will have to worry about being prosecuted for years to come.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/beyond-the-spy-sc...
“In facilities across the region, Megaspeed rents Nvidia chips to Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba, an arrangement that does not violate current US export control regulations.”
If Alibaba is allowed to remotely access Nvidia hardware physically located in Singapore, what purpose does the export control serve?
Also, it has not been established that any export control laws have been violated.
this "data center" was one of those locations that Alibaba was supposed to remotely use, assuming the terms were that they had to. the implication is that this "data center" was fake and that GPUs were physically routed to China still.
The board and Jensen himself probably don't want to test that in court, so they preemptively step down so the prosecutors would rather not pursue.
Do you simply take them to be fools?
Instead of playing lawyer with you it's quite obviously reasonable to assume the board recognizes his actions open up a Pandora's box of severe legal liability. And quite frankly, I'm not really impressed by your pedestrian analysis of export law. If it was that clear cut he would still be there, and the modus operandi of the Chinese spy wouldn't even make any sense.
For your analysis to have any credibility Nvidia would have to disregard its own self interest. Is that really how you think the world works?
How would you know this?
Well, there is also a problem in that the US government agencies tasked with investigating such things are currently very compromised.
Todd Blanche, the Attorney General/head of DOJ, constantly says that his job is to protect the Trump administration. And Trump is linked to this whole story in various ways.
So there will be no fair investigation for the foreseeable future, other than potential congressional oversight hearings next year after the Democrats take control of Congress.
He'd have no shortage of talent and funding to embark on such a venture.
The big question is once the dust settles (including a possible divorce), he'll still have billions of dollars and need a reason to get out of bed. Being that he's a famous workaholic, I imagine he will try something new after he's done licking his wounds.
I dont even like Jensen but this is ridiculous. We need more media literacy in this country, we can't just hop on whatever narrative the NYT, WSJ and CNN push onto us.
This whole thing is clearly a political hit job on behalf of the AI lab lobby. Wild everyone fell for this garbage.
They literally trickled out leaks about random affairs, this was highky coordinated and hard to tell who was exactly responsible. But the journalist at the NYT responsible for these initial leaks has tons of past scoops with sources at the highest levels of Anthropic.
Edit: This got downvoted literally instantly. This is a new account and my karma instantly went to zero... Bots much.